Thursday Jun 01, 2006

Development within Sun is a fast paced F1 race track at times. While not as
sunny and luxurious a location as Monte Carlo, Sun still has the racing speed.
With new builds of Solaris (be it nevada or updates) every other week and
patches incoming all the time for performance runs we can't afford to be the
slowest pit crew on the track.

Automation is the name of the game here.

With patches there are a few ways of building a machine with a given release of
Solaris and having it patches up, ready to roll all magik and nice. Jumpstart
gives us a hook into the install process for us to drop in just about any
scripts to do what we want.

You got a machine to reinstall, patch and get running ? Heres one way.

Say you've a machine or machines to install every now and again. So you've got
a jumpstart server all ready to go. You're used to installing the machine and
then logging on to add all those patches. Takes a while, you go for coffe while
the patchadd goes on and on and on..

Jumpstart has a feature where you can add in your own scripts once the machine
has been installed and before its been rebooted. Theres a rules file where you
can name a script to be run after install. More details on this are at
Custom JumpStart. This
script along with knowing all your patches are in a nfs-shared path somewhere
can let you automate all those patchadds. Leaving you to go more interesting
things (thats your imagination, not mine :).